


Then What is Emptiness For?  To Fill, Fill

by WhyNotFly



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Apologies for the sharp ending, I just wanted to finish it off because I've been sitting on the first half of this for weeks, I took matters into my own hands, It didn't end up being as shippy as I pictured it, Lots of Martin introspection, M/M, Sorry about how much time I spend with my oc, Spoilers up to season 4 episode 132, Technically not Buried!Martin but he hovers on the edge, and it definitely didn't end up happy, but JONNY won't give us a canonical buried avatar so...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 00:20:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19841596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: There are muddy footprints leading up to Martin’s flat.  At first he convinced himself it was just someone in the building who forgot to knock their boots before coming inside (even though it hadn’t rained in a week), but the trail led straight to his door.  His door which was hanging open a crack.  The wood where his lock had been was splintered and broken, mud caked black onto the dusty gold of the handle.  A set of footprints leading in.  Nothing leading out.****Jon is trapped in the coffin.  The Buried offers Martin a way to return him.





	Then What is Emptiness For?  To Fill, Fill

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from _The Language_ by Robert Creeley. The recording Martin hears is from episode 99, Dust to Dust.

There are muddy footprints leading up to Martin’s flat. At first he convinced himself it was just someone in the building who forgot to knock their boots before coming inside (even though it hadn’t rained in a week), but the trail led straight to his door. His door which was hanging open a crack. The wood where his lock had been was splintered and broken, mud caked black onto the dusty gold of the handle. A set of footprints leading in. Nothing leading out.

He could just leave. He could just turn around and leave. Clearly there’s something spooky in his apartment, clearly it’s not afraid of him knowing it’s there, clearly this is just an invitation to sink further down the awful rabbit hole or maybe get kidnapped or murdered. He should just leave and go...where?

Something crumbles further in Martin’s calcifying heart as he realizes he has nowhere to go. No mom, no family, no friends. No one at work talks to him, let alone would let him crash with them. He could go back to the Institute and sleep in his office, but he can’t stand the thought of Jon still being there, probably sleeping a few stories below him, not even knowing whether Martin made it home safe tonight. Not even caring, probably. Staying with Peter? He might be better off dying. 

Martin feels cold as he pushes open his ruined door. He’s not sure if it’s the dread or the empty pit that’s been open in his chest since he saw Jon’s corpse. Martin always seems to be cold these days. There’s a young man sitting at Martin’s kitchen table. He’s leaning forward onto folded arms, his back rising and falling in a steady rhythm. His soft brown curls are dusted in dirt and he’s wearing what were clearly white socks at one point. Martin glances to the side and sees a pair of unfamiliar work boots caked in muck lined up neatly to the right of his welcome mat. Oddly considerate.

“So, The Buried, huh,” Martin says from the doorway, hoping to get this over with. The figure in the chair doesn’t move, just stays slumped, breathing slowly and methodically. Martin waits a long, tense moment before he tries again, louder. “Uh, hello?”

Confused and emboldened, Martin crosses the room, letting his smashed door swing mostly shut behind him. He leans around the strange man and sees his eyes closed, his mouth opened on blackened teeth, silt seeping from the corner of it and spilling onto Martin’s nice clean table.

“Are you seriously asleep?” Martin demands, and that finally seems to rouse the man. His eyes blink open slowly, as if the movement requires effort beyond measure. Dust rises from him in clouds as he sits up and shakes out his hair, and Martin wonders how long he could possibly have been sitting here. The man yawns slowly before he finally seems to see Martin and gives him a sleepy grin.

“Ah. Martin. I’ve been waiting.”

“You’ve been _waiting_? You fell asleep on my table.” Martin isn’t sure why he’s so annoyed. Maybe he just finally wanted a murderer who treated him like a little bit of a threat. 

“Oh, sorry,” says the man, not sounding sorry. “I like your home. It’s warm and comforting. Cozy.”

 _Small_. Martin interprets, frowning. He’s done with this conversation. “Are you here for something?” 

“You must have felt so trapped, didn’t you. With the hive at your door. No light, no contact, no escape. Just these tiny rooms and tiny walls and closed windows and sealed up doors and the caking aching isolation. Your own home, your own grave.”

“What do you _want_ ,” Martin snaps, slamming a hand down on the table to cut off the awful words. His ears feel heavy and full.

The man looks up, his half lidded eyes almost surprised at the sudden noise. “We want you, of course, Martin Blackwood.”

The surety of it falls like a lump in his stomach. Of course. He should have seen it coming. Martin stands there stupid as the man rises, running a grimy hand up his arm. His skin prickles at the sediment. The words come to him distant, as if he is floating in Peter’s fog. Different though. Less scattered, more resonant. “You think you are isolated, Martin, but you are insulated. You are the core, you are the center around which your world turns. Be weighted. Hold them close. Keep them safe.”

Martin tries to breathe in and nearly chokes on the dust in his throat. “W-who are you?”

“We are the endless embrace.”

“No.” Martin shakes his head. “Who are _you_?”

“Ahhh,” the man tilts his head back. His hand has somehow reached Martin’s face and slides back into his hair. It feels dense and tangled where he touches. He closes his eyes slowly, a single crease of concentration breaking on his brow. “I am Philip. Phillips. Tu...cker. Tucker Phillips.” 

“No. No way. This isn’t right.” Martin tries to move away from Tucker’s hand but his body feels heavy and immobile. “I won’t forget my own name. I can’t forget who I am and why I’m doing this.”

“Forgetting is the purview of your forsaken, Martin. We merely believe that who you are is less important than where you are. Where do you want to be?”

“Right now? Anywhere but here.”

“In the arms of your beloved Archivist, perhaps?” 

“Jon has nothing to do with you.”

“Jon is already within us.” Tucker slides forward and Martin braces for some kind of attack, but instead he simply feels arms wrapping around him in a tight and comforting hug. Tucker’s breath is warm on his ear and Martin feels some of the emptiness inside his chest start to collapse. Is he really so pathetic that he craves any contact, even from a monster? “Jon is curled inside our diaphragm, crushed and kept and safe, undying, unchanging. As he could be in your embrace forever.”

“So what?” Martin tries to sound angry, but can’t quite summon it. He feels sleepy and complacent, like he’s wrapped in one too many blankets. Keeping his eyes open is a struggle. “This is a hostage negotiation? I join you and you let Jon go free?”

“Oh no, we will return him to you as a gift. We admire your resolve to protect. We would not want to come between a flower and its root.” Tucker pulls back from the hug and Martin tries not to miss the weight of semi-human contact. “But see how long he stays beside you without you keeping him beside you. It is the unfortunate nature of humans to fling themselves towards self destructive change.”

“I don’t want Jon to be my prisoner,” Martin says.

“No. Just yours.”

****

Martin clicks on the last of the recorders and sits down at Jon’s desk with a sigh. He feels wrapped in the buzzing static of Jon’s familiar voice piling up and upon itself. The coffin regards him solemnly, and he regards it back. 

He shouldn’t have been surprised, learning Jon threw himself into the coffin of almost certain doom. Martin can admit that he’s a little delusional when it comes to his regard for Jon, but even he can’t pretend the Archivist has any kind of self preservation instinct. Someone would have to physically restrain Jon to keep him from jumping headfirst into danger.

Martin drums his fingers nervously on the desk, trying to steer his thoughts away from holding Jon down. Tries to shake away the image of his body lying atop Jon’s, his fingers pressing furrows into his throat so that he cannot Ask, laying heavy kisses on his eyes, so that he cannot See. Maybe it wouldn’t be so wrong. To stay there and know Jon is safe beneath him. Always in arms reach.

 _I did find the body of Stefan, though, about twenty yards away, so encrusted with dirt he barely looked human anymore_ , says The Archivist, the words somehow reaching Martin through the overlapping hubbub of the dozens of tapes.

There had been no reason not to try what Tucker had suggested. Worst case scenario, Jon can’t get any _more_ eternally trapped in the heart of the Buried. Best case...well. Martin tries not to think about best cases anymore. Wishful thinking hadn’t gotten him anywhere. Better not to set yourself up for disappointment.

Martin stands, abruptly, Jon’s chair scraping across the floor. There’s no point to sitting here like this. Either Jon is never going to come out, in which case this was all a stupid waste of time, or Jon is going to come out and Martin can’t _be_ here when that happens. If that happens. He’s gone through too much, he’s come too far, he can’t just ruin it all. The coffin is humming, but Martin has acquired a talent for tuning out the world. The trick is to realize the world isn’t worth noticing.

He hums the entirety of his train ride home. He doesn’t recognize the melody, but it fills the spaces between his ribs.

****

Martin can feel when Jon escapes the coffin. He shouldn’t be able to but he can, like a tugging on his stomach. What had the man said? His _diaphragm_. The feeling piles up inside him until Martin is sure that if he talks it will force its way up his throat and tumble from his mouth like crushed leaves. He wrote a poem once about choking on love. It had been about his mother, and the grave he dug around himself as he sacrificed his life for her contempt. It’s nice, doing something good and not getting thanked for it. Makes it feel more right. Makes it feel like it’s not your fault when everything goes wrong.

Martin doesn’t ask Jon to come to his office, but he isn’t surprised by it. Maybe Jon Knew immediately what had happened when he emerged, breathed in Martin’s intentions with the words crowding the air. He pushes open the door and for a moment Martin lets himself look at him. Thin, bedraggled, glasses askew, dirt-caked hair, sallow skin. Martin feels a surge of protectiveness so great it threatens to swallow him. He drinks in the moment, desperate to memorize the feeling, before he comes to his senses. With a thunk, Martin slides out of his chair and crawls into the space beneath his desk. He puts his back to the solid wood and pulls his knees up tight.

“Martin,” Jon says.

“Please,” Jon says.

Martin shuts his eyes. Swallows the desperation filling his lungs like water. “I’m not allowed to see Jon,” he says, carefully. “I’m not allowed to look at Jon. But talking out loud to ourselves is sort of what we do here, right? I mean, I’m sure there’s a tape recorder going _somewhere_.”

The words hang in the room and Martin feels the air pressing down thick around him. The space beneath the desk seems to grow smaller and smaller until he cannot breathe and he’s struck by the sudden certainty the darkness behind his eyelids is permanent and he will never see anything again. Then, distantly, he hears a hesitant footstep, and then another, and then the sound of Jon sitting down on the floor and leaning his back against the desk.

Martin turns and presses a hand to the wood of the desk behind him, thinking about the warmth of Jon’s body just inches away. Jon says nothing, and it’s a silence so much fuller than any Martin has ever experienced before.

“It’s all the same, isn’t it,” Martin says. “The Fears. They’re all the same in the end. Beholding, Lonely, Buried, there isn’t actually a right answer. There isn’t actually a lesser evil. There’s just evil, and pain, a-and loss, and love all caught up in the middle of it. I want to know the difference between being buried alive and digging your own grave but I don’t think there is one. You just end up dead, and the people you care about end up hurt.”

Martin breathes and Jon says nothing. The space beneath the desk is impossibly small.

“If I’m going to be a monster, why shouldn’t I get to hold you?”

Jon doesn’t answer, but it hangs there in the silence. Because monsters don’t hold, they strangle. Water does not embrace, it drowns. Soil cannot love. It can wrap around and around and press down and keep everything the same, but all you’re left with is choking darkness and fear. Always always fear.

“I’m so sorry, Jon,” Martin says, and it’s dangerous and it’s tantalizing. The air smells like heavy, wet earth. Martin presses his forehead against the smooth wood under his desk and longs for something that has always been within reach.

**Author's Note:**

> Gosh I finally finished this fic. It's been half done for what feels like forever. Of course it's a bit of a rushed ending but I like doing things in one sitting. And I'm only just now looking at my clock and realizing it's 1 am on a work night. Heck. Hope you all enjoy my bad decision!!
> 
> As usual, thanks to @somnuscribe for reading it over (only half of it but whatevs) and for being so deeply buriedcore that it inspired me :)
> 
> I'm @apatheticbutterflies on tumblr, I post meta and writing, please come talk to me I'm so full of magnus archives thoughts and feelings. Thank you for reading!


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